It was the three consecutive year that KAMSC dominated the contest. The competition drew 45 teams of up to three people each from Michigan schools. Twenty-six of those were from Kalamazoo County, said Shannon Houtrouw, KAMSC computer science instructor and head of the KAMSC computer-programming teams.

The competition winners were a KAMSC/Portage junior trio of Sujay Dewan and Raoul Wadhwa of Portage Northern High School and Abhiram Krishnan of Portage Central.

In second place were KAMSC seniors Tyler Dougherty of Climax-Scotts, Mary Farner of Loy Norrix and Will Sawyer of Portage Northern.

KAMSC is a countywide magnet high school that enrolls about 300 Kalamazoo-area students in grades 9-12. Students attend their home high school for a half day and take classes in math, science and computers at KAMSC, which is located at the intersection of Vine Street and South Westnedge Avenue.

Houtrouw said he took his first team to the Saginaw Valley competition 11 years ago, and has seen an increasing number of participants every year.

On Friday, he took 78 students to Saginaw Valley --"and that was with a dozen of our varsity programmers out with various conflicts (Robotics FIRST Regionals, Research competition in Detroit)," Hourtouw wrote in an email to the Kalamazoo Gazette. "There were another 12 or so who competed at SVSU and had to turn right back around and head back for the band festivals that were going on in Mattawan and Plainwell.

"Additionally, high school computer science competitions are not known for success in drawing many female programmers. But as you can see from the KAMSC team photo, the enthusiasm for CS is pretty gender neutral. In all, 32 of our young women turned out for the event."

$50 Best Buy cards were awarded to the winning team, while the second-place finishers received $25 cards, and third place earned $15 awards.